Drama is the spine of cinema, the genre where performance, script and direction have nowhere to hide. From the courtroom pressure of 12 Angry Men to the generational weight of The Godfather, it has always rewarded patience and attention. See what Macca makes of the best and worst of it below.
Rating: 2.5★
By the late 1980s, the American action film had carved out a fairly reliable template: a physically gifted lead, an exotic location, and enough punching to fill ninety-odd minutes. Bloodsport, released in 1988, slots neatly into that tradition, though it adds a specific wrinkle by setting its story in
Rating: 3.5★
Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel Im Westen nichts Neues is one of those books that has never really been out of print, and for good reason. Written from the ground level of the German trenches, it was one of the first major works to push back against the
Rating: 2.5★
Mariya Saakyan's The Lighthouse (original title: Mayak) arrived in 2006 as something of a quiet outlier in post-Soviet cinema, a short, low-key Armenian drama that found its way onto the festival circuit without ever threatening mainstream attention. Its subject matter sits at the unresolved, painful edges
Rating: 2.0★
The Comoros, a small archipelago nation nestled in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and the east coast of Africa, is about as far from Hollywood as it is possible to get, in every sense. With a population of under a million people and an economy that regularly ranks among the
Rating: 2.5★
Before Sunset arrives as the middle chapter of Richard Linklater's trilogy following two strangers whose paths cross briefly and, it turns out, unforgettably. If you've read our review of Before Sunrise, you'll already know the setup: in 1995, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie
Rating: 4.5★
Few events in twentieth-century history carry the weight of the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944, and relatively few filmmakers had attempted to render them on screen with any serious commitment to their horror before Steven Spielberg arrived with Saving Private Ryan in the summer of 1998. The
Rating: 3.0★
Jean Genet is best known to most people as a novelist and playwright, the author of works like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Maids, a writer whose entire creative life was shaped by time spent on the margins of French society, including real spells in prison. Un Chant
Rating: 4.0★
Tunisia's post-revolution years produced a wave of filmmaking that wrestled openly with what had been suppressed for decades: questions of religion, gender, state violence, and family. Four Daughters (2023) sits within that tradition while doing something altogether more unusual with it. The film begins from a real
Rating: 1.5★
The short film is a curious creature in the broader landscape of cinema. Freed from the commercial pressures that govern feature production, it can take risks, experiment with form, and land a genuine punch in the time it takes to boil a kettle. Some of the most memorable pieces of
Rating: 3.0★
Jean-Pierre Bekolo arrived at Aristotle's Plot as one of the more provocative voices to emerge from Francophone African cinema in the early 1990s. His debut feature, Quartier Mozart (1992), had already marked him out as a filmmaker more interested in subverting genre conventions than playing it safe,
Rating: 3.0★
Bulgarian cinema has, over the past two decades or so, carved out a modest but respected place in the European art house conversation, with films that tend to favour economic storytelling, unglamorous settings, and a willingness to sit with uncomfortable social realities. The Lesson (or Urok in its original Bulgarian)
Rating: 1.5★
There is something genuinely exciting about the idea of a kaiju film rooted in the Caribbean. The genre, broadly speaking, has been Japanese territory since Toho Studios first unleashed Godzilla on unsuspecting cinema audiences in 1954, and the handful of Western studios that have tried their hand at giant-creature
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